ROYSDON: Call us hillbillies if you must; we're proud

The Stewarts, members of Keith Roysdon’s mother’s family. Those in the back row (from left) Ovella (Keith’s mother), Arzonia, Oshie and Oma, were the first in the family to come to Muncie with their father, James Albert Stewert (seated in front row, holding Silas). Also in the front row: James Paul, mother Idabell (with Marybell on her lap) and Cora.
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Even now, 40 years later, the insults the bozo threw at my family sting a little.

"Hey, look at those hillbillies over there! They're walking funny because they're not used to flat ground."

My mom and dad and uncles and aunts and cousins and I kept walking. The bozo, after all, was literally that: a bozo, a carnival performer paid to sit in a dunk tank and hurl insults at passersby, hoping to egg them into paying to throw baseballs at a target until he was dunked in murky water.

The setting was the midway at the Delaware County Fair, some summer in the early 1970s, and even while I understood that the bozo was just doing his job, the "hillbilly" reference had some bite.

Face it, it's not like my family was surrounded by Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as we walked up and down the midway. And few people would suggest early 1970s carnies were such arbiters of refined breeding that they should be editing the Social Register.

But still. For a group of people who hailed from Jamestown, Tennessee, hillbilly was a sensitive word.

I have a sweet but feisty aunt who, even at her age, might still be inclined to punch anybody who used the word hillbilly in a derogatory manner.

I was old enough at the time to know there was some stigma attached to the word but not smart enough to know how widespread that stigma was. Or how hurtful that label could be.

My parents, as young adults in the post-war years, had separately made their way from Jamestown to Muncie. My dad was a vet who was about to begin 30 long, hot, tiring years at what was then Warner Gear. My mom traded stints at American Lawnmower and Ball Brothers for a full-time job raising, by the late 1950s, three rambunctious boys. Before they retired and passed on, my parents also ran a farm and fishing ponds.

Sure there were some carousers in my family. Two beloved uncles — one of them with "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on his fingers, like Robert Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter" — were known to enjoy Muncie's finest drinking establishments. And a cousin died in what was to me a mysterious shooting down south.

But the men and women in my family, through their example, helped me become the person I like to think I turned out to be: Unrefined sometimes, but honest and hard-working.

If "hillbilly" seemed like an insult, imagine how those hard-working Tennesseans and Kentuckians and West Virginians and others from the south felt to encounter attitudes like that of one Muncie township trustee who — in Robert Lynd's 1937 follow-up to his earlier "Middletown" sociological case study — was quoted referring to the southerners who migrated to Muncie as "human debris."

Wow.

There's an argument to be made that impressions of a people are created by their worst representatives. I'd imagine that few would point to a successful business owner or school teacher and note he or she was from Jamestown or Byrdstown or Somerset, Kentucky.

But more than a few would point to names in the arrest log, I'm sure, and tsk-tsk, "The hilljacks were tearing up the bars again Friday night."

But you know what? That doesn't matter. Whenever I see two old guys stopped in the aisle at the grocery store or I overhear a bunch of Chevrolet retirees at McDonald's talking about making that northward trip from the old home place, I don't see human debris.

I see people who left everything familiar behind to come to a city that was big and unfriendly and intimidating to them, just to work in a hellishly hot factory, making glass jars or transmission parts. Men and women who worked to make a living but also, without giving it a single thought, made Muncie the city that it became.